In modern vehicles it has become important to give the driver of the vehicle a personalised driving experience and the possibility to control various functions of the vehicle through i.a. input buttons, joysticks or knobs. The more control functions the vehicle is provided with, the more input buttons and/or input menus are present in the vehicle. The design of these input buttons and input menus is vital for a positive driving experience and is a task that involves the question of how the driver perceives matters like symbols and grouping of buttons in order to make the interface intuitive.
One trend is to collect and to display the most vital information in and around the driver's line of sight to help the driver keep his or her sight and focus on the road ahead of the vehicle as opposed to have to look down to search for a certain menu or display. Some vehicles have even been provided with parts of the displayed information being put on display on the windscreen, a so called Head-up display. Less important and more seldom used items may be placed further away from the line of sight, such as on a centre column between the front seats. Input buttons, joysticks or knobs may also be provided on said centre column or on or around the front door handles.
An often used location for input buttons or similar is on the steering wheel or in close proximity of the steering wheel, where the driver mostly holds the hands during driving. The reason being to help the driver to maintain driving safety by keeping the hands on the steering wheel, or at least not forcing him or her to unnecessarily remove them from the steering wheel. It has been a trend to locate a rather large number of dedicated buttons on either side of the steering wheel, each button showing a fixed symbol. The symbols may seem illustrative and simple to understand for a designer of such prior art systems, but for someone who is not driving the car on a regular basis it may be found difficult to remember the functionality. The full functionality of the vehicle may consequently not be used, or safety is lowered when searching for the proper button.
One prior art system is disclosed in WO 01/60650 A1. Here a large number of buttons are located on either side of the steering wheel, each button corresponding to a button on the display of the dashboard. The dashboard display discloses a symbol for each button disclosing the functionality thereof in order to improve driving safety by not forcing the driver to look down on the steering wheel buttons to search for the desired button.
It is an object of the embodiments disclosed herein to further improve the driver's ease of use of the different functions that are involved in controlling the vehicle in order to maintain, or even improve, driving safety.